CD protection software is the biggest pain in PC gaming. I hate it with a firey passion.

About 5 days after getting Colin McRea Dirt, my DVD drive died, so I had to replace it. When I got my new one and tried to play Dirt, it told me I was using an illegal copy. I am given to understand that this was because it registered the game with that drive, now thedrive was gone it thought it was illigitimate.I had two choices, either buy the game again because the anticopy software thought I'd pirated the game, or get a no cd crack. Guess what I decided to do.

I tend to play games that don't require a disc more than those that do, out of sheer lazyness for having to grab the disc all the time. So I actually have a few good games that I highly enjoyed playing sitting unfinished because I can't be bothered to put the disc back in my drive.

On the other hand, if you are talking about downloading a game... I have downloaded games before to see what they are like, and then bought them if I liked them. Some games don't have demos so it's nice to check the game out first. If developers did this themselves I think there would be less piracy. Like the old days of Shareware where you could play 20% of a game for free and pay for the rest. Most demos now are 5%, if that, and often don't give a good picture of what the game is like. Crysis for example, only shown the first level of the game, which the gameplay in Crysis changed rapidly throughout the game. So the demo was a very poor example of what the game was like.

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I'm hoping that Huxley will be just that, if you havn't heard much from it you should check it out. It is an MMO though, so might not be quite your cup of tea? But it is an FPS with customisation and upgrading of skills and abilities. Details are a little short on whether you can customise your weapons and armour but it does sound like you can upgrade parts of armour and gain new weapons etc. It certainly sounds interesting.

The problem I have with big RPG type games like Deus Ex or Oblivionis that you have to invest a lot of time in it on your own, which is why I like MMO because while you are investing a lot of time, you can interact with real people while doing it. So with Huxley being MMO and FPS, it's definitly got me interested, just hope it doesn't end up just being PvP dominated. But I do know it has an extensive PvE section where you can go on missions with other people or solo against NPC enemies.

Other than that, I can't think of any FPS games coming out with any RPG elements to speak of to be honest. It seems that developers are making their games more idiot proof and making them easier to pick up and put down. Rather than trying to get the player addicted and sitting down for hours on end playing it. So games tend to have less depth than they really should.

Oh, I guess there is Rage, but thats years away from release so not much use at the moment.

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It certainly is a good game and very easy to get into. Personally I prefere Prophacies to any other campaign because it has a much slower pacing and you kind of evolve your play style with the charcter as you level up and get new abilities. It can take weeks to get a character up to level 20, while in Factions I've got characters up to level 20 in 4 hours.

I actually found Factions to be the hardest, and therefore the one I played the least. Nightfall is similar to Prophacies in the pacing but it is still faster, and then with Eye of the North it requires you to have a good character already so there's no build up to it, you're just stright into hard areas. Again I didn't play Eye of the North very much before I stopped playing the game, I kinda got bored of the RPG thing and moved over to FPS games instead, so I don't play Guild Wars anymore, but I do have fond memories of it.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Main_Page

Best source of Guild Wars information you'll come across, has help for all the missions and where to get rare items etc, tons of info.

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This does sound quite strange, what refresh rate is your monitor at? Perhapse try 75Hz and see how that goes.

On the potential power issue, I had a problem a couple of weeks back where my computer would run check disk when ever I booted and it always found errors. I assumed it was my HDD on it's last legs but one day my computer just failed to boot at all. Checked my surge protector and it had burnt out, I believe my computer was drawing too much power for it to take and was causing my computer to lose power while shutting down every time. With a better grade surge protector I haven't had a problem with it since, try a different surge protector, different make and brand to the one you are using currently.

Don't know if any of that could help you but it's worth a shot.

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Usually the only settings that will be locked out are graphical features that aren't supported. Now for a lot of new games, Shader Model 3.0 is being used for High and Very High settings, maybe your graphics card doesn't support it? It also doesn't support HDR and AA at the same time (going on your Oblivion comment), which means I'd guess it's Nvidia? I'm pretty certain that Geforce6 series supports SM 3.0, not entirely sure whether the low end 6's do SM 3.0, I'd imagine that they would. As far as I can remember

If you do have a newer card, then there's something wrong with it.

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Talk?! With a "Xbox 360" user

Rylsadar

Yes I know, a scary concept but there are people that play PC and xBox 360 games I guess. Can't imagine the idea catching on though.

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The Games for Windows stuff just means that the xBox 360 pad is specificly supported and configured, it will work other games fine but instead of seeing "B" or "X" buttons in the button config menus it will say "Button 4" or "Button 2".

The dead zones on the analogue sticks will also be a bit crap as well and will need manual fiddling. I've also had problems with the two triggers being pressed at once but I think that is due to drivers, not certain though.

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I haven't had many problems with Vista but the ones I have had have been due to drivers rather than Vista itself. Most of what I've heard people complain about have been due to drivers but they tend to just dump the blame on Vista and revert back to XP.

Also Vista seems to be abit bad with wireless, don't know whether that was due to drivers as well but I could never get a wireless stable for more than a couple of hours, soI just hard wired and had done with it.

As for Vista being slower, yes it is a little slower but most of the speed decrease is due to the hard drive indexing that Vista defaults to. If you disable the search features and turn off hard drive indexing Vista speeds right up and runs fairly smooth.

From what I've read also, Vista will get a big speed boost from SP1, so I guess with that Vista will be as fast and usable as XP is.

In a years time, I don't think there will be any reason not to upgrade to Vista (for home users at least, it'll take a lot more for Vista to be useful in business).

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There is actually an important destinction between Games for Windows and Games for Windows LIVE.

Games for Windows is just a stamp on the box that says "This game supports xBox 360 game pad". There are a couple of other things that a game developer must do to be able to put the stamp on, but they're less obvious. There is a list of this stuff on the Games for Windows website

Games for Windows LIVE means the game conforms to the Games for Windows stuff as well as using Microsofts online gaming network, which is a straight copy of xBox LIVE.

A lot of developers are going for this Games for Windows stuff because it's no real pain to do, but most seem to prefer to do their own online features and avoid LIVE like the plague because it is just that. LIVE is certainly too young to be any good yet but the idea is if you play xBox 360 and PC games, you can have one LIVE account and use it on both and talk to your xBox 360 friends while playing a PC game, and even play them with cross compatible games. So the idea is sound but I think developers are avoiding because you have to pay a subscription to get the extra features like cross compatible gaming. Maybe Microsoft will realise that PC gamers have had LIVE features for free for years on other services, and still do, and asking for money for their service is dumb, but you can never predict Microsoft.

Personally I've not had many issues with Gears of War appart from my save game dissapearing.

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Same happened to me, I was able to save and load my game a bunch of times and then one day it was gone and I had to start again. Which didn't bother me too much since I was really enjoying the game, I don't know how far I was through the game though. I've not heard anything on why this happened or whether they are working on a patch or anything really.

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